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I understand what you are saying (I think ) but I still don't get why the physical view of things in inSSIDer did not show the "staff wireless" AP running on channels 1 + 5. If they are on different channels then they cant be virtual id's

Originally Posted by Joel

inSSIDer Office (and the rest of our products) group networks in two ways.

In *Physical* mode, we group all of the virtual SSID's on one radio together. For example, at home, I have "Joel's Network" and "Joel's Guest Network" on the same radio. They are both virtual SSIDs. Since they are broadcast from the same 2.4 GHz radio, inSSIDer groups them together. We accomplish this by looking at the last nibble of the MAC address. Most vendors increment the last nibble to distinguish between SSID's, e.g. DE:AD:BE:EF:0A:5B and DE:AD:BE:EF:0A:5C. When we display that MAC in the Physical view, we put an "x" over the last nibble to indicate that it is a wildcard. Virtual SSID's from the same AP will always be on the same channel. One AP can't broadcast virtual SSID's on two radios (unless we are talking about 2.4 vs 5 GHz).

In *Logical* mode, we group all SSID's that are the same (that's basically the definition of an ESSID) together. If you had 10 AP's that were all called "Joel's Network", we'd group those together.

I visited a church once that had two SSID's, a locked down admin SSID, and a guest SSID. They were on a pretty tight budget, so they didn't have gear that could do virtual SSID's. Instead, they placed pairs of home routers everywhere. One doing the admin SSID, and one doing the guest SSID. In this case, inSSIDer obviously won't group them, because they aren't virtual SSIDs.